Then Trump turned toward Iran. The Russia-Ukraine war dropped in US foreign policy priority list. Now, because of oil and gas, it’s back at the top again. Trump realized that he cannot be at war with two of the largest oil and gas countries in the world. Iran may only be seventh on the list of the world’s largest oil producers, but by closing down the Strait of Hormuz, Iran indirectly affects some 20% of global oil production.

Russia, however, is the world’s second largest producer of both oil and gas. The Europeans dismissed the recent US-Russia diesel deal as another stunt by Trump, and it’s true that it won’t affect gasoline prices in the US by much. If it had been an isolated deal, I wouldn’t have paid much attention either. But it wasn’t. Trump followed up with actions he had hitherto shied away from.

The first sign came last Wednesday morning. Ukrainian media reported that, overnight, the country’s forces had experienced sudden restrictions on Starshield, the military part of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system. Ukrainian drones were losing signal when they traveled faster than 160 kilometers per hour. The sudden throttling of the service disrupted several Ukrainian drone missions.

The presumption within Ukraine was that SpaceX had imposed those restrictions on behalf of the US government. And the next day, Reuters reported that the order came directly from the White House, which had been angered by Ukraine’s continued targeting of Russian refineries. So this was not a technical service disruption, but a ruthless application of the kill switch. All we got from the White House, though, were news leaks. No official statements. Not even a tweet. For the Trump administration, this is not normal.

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Along with the news of the throttling of Starshield came suggestions that the US had ended intelligence sharing. On the night of 12 October, Russia launched a volley of ballistic missiles at Ukraine. Normally, US intelligence would give the Ukrainians a warning. But on this occasion, there was no heads-up — and the results were horrendous.

Until that point, intelligence sharing had been one of the most important components of the defense of Ukraine. The Americans have satellite-based infrared systems that can detect ballistic missile launches, and the Ukrainians could rely on it.

But things had changed. Two days after the attack, it was reported that the White House had discussed ending the sharing of intelligence. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, wanted to continue sharing intelligence — but others, it seems, didn’t. Trump denied that the US had cut intelligence sharing. Indeed, it is possible that Russia may have used weapons that resisted detection. We should at this point treat the disruption of information flows as suspicious, but unexplained, even if that flow now seems to have definitively resumed.

Then, late on Friday, Trump used an executive order to waive the implementation of sanctions against Russia under the Graham Act, whose goal was to deprive Russia of financial resources that allow it to wage war against Ukraine. Named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump had signed it into law only last month.

The secrecy, the reports of meetings inside the White House, the reports from Ukraine itself, and the suspension of the Graham Act: together these developments give us a coherent picture, even if some of the details are still missing. They tell us that the US is no longer actively engaged in the defense of Ukraine.

That’s different from the situation in late February last year, when Trump and Zelensky clashed in the White House. After that meeting, the US paused weapons deliveries and financial assistance. The White House also cut off intelligence sharing for a week, but then resumed it.

But what the Americans are doing now is far more coordinated. And it presents the Europeans with a conundrum. They will attempt to mitigate the effects of this change in US policy, however, there is not much they can do. They can offer intelligence from their own satellite network, but this will not match the communication quality Ukraine’s fast drones require to function as intended.

Nevertheless, Zelensky turned up at the European Council in Brussels last week, where EU leaders took another opportunity to show their solidarity with the Ukrainian leader. He is a regular guest there. But beneath the bonhomie, tensions are rising. Ukraine is running out of money faster than the Europeans had expected. Last December, the Belgians vetoed the sequestration of Russian funds that are sitting, frozen, in a Belgian bank. The EU reluctantly agreed a €90bn loan to Ukraine, money they themselves borrowed, pretending that Russia would eventually have to pay back this loan. The loan was supposed to plug Ukraine’s funding gap for this year and next.

As it turns out, Ukraine now needs another €70bn. Marine Le Pen, the front-runner in the French presidential election race, has promised that, if elected, she would cut off all support for Ukraine. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, has promised more funding, but this money is not showing up anywhere in his government’s own budgets.

While Zelensky revels in the public admiration of Europe’s leaders, then, the foundations of Western support have been getting shakier. Now it is getting even harder, because the US is actively conspiring against Europe. The deal under which the US buys 4.8 million tons of diesel from Russia looks like an attempt to restart commercial relationships. I expect this will be the first of several natural resources deals between the US and Russia.

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I could, for example, see a deal struck over Russian gas. Envoys have been discussing extending their new commercial partnership to the defunct Nord Stream pipeline that used to carry gas from Russia to Germany. This would be an ironic twist, because it was the first Trump administration that placed sanctions on the German and Russian operators who were building Nord Stream 2, a successor pipeline.

In September 2022, the section of piping that runs below the Baltic Sea was sabotaged. A Ukrainian commando is accused of being behind the explosion. The trial against one of the suspects started in Germany last week, and it promises to give us a lot of details of this operation, including information about the extent of Zelensky’s involvement.

Germans will be watching closely. Like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, the hard-Right Alternative for Germany is also opposed to Ukraine aid. The AfD has, over the past year, enjoyed a fast rise in the opinion polls. The Ukraine war is one of the themes most central to its campaign, and the trial will be a gift to them that will keep on giving.

Trump’s negotiators recently pressed the Europeans to release parts of the frozen Russian assets: to make them available for a special Ukraine investment fund, rather than directing them toward further fighting. The Europeans rejected this request, because their plan is to fund Ukraine’s war with Russian money. I am reminded of the old Thatcher joke about why socialism does not work: because socialists run out of other people’s money. If the EU got its wish and were able to sequester the Russian money, given how fast Ukraine is spending money, it would not last for long.

Additionally, the EU is exploring the possibility of giving full membership of the bloc to Ukraine, but membership can only help fund the reconstruction of Ukraine if accompanied with large fiscal transfers. Right now, Germany is leading a group of countries that are opposing a plan by the European Commission to increase the size of the next EU budget. The Europeans say one thing, but do another: a classic case of revealed preferences clashing with stated preferences.

Politically, and financially, the room for maneuver by the Europeans is decreasing. The Europeans need the US, but the US, having enthusiastically supported Ukraine under Joe Biden, has become first a reluctant supporter and now a country that no longer pretends to support Ukraine. I doubt very much that, come 2029, even a Democratic president would expend political capital on a war, which by then would have been waged for seven years.

Wars usually end when one side is running out of food, oil, or other critical supplies. It is delusional to think that with an oil price at $110 a barrel, the world’s second-largest oil producer is running out of money. The war will end eventually, most likely with a dirty peace deal that will leave the Europeans in shock.

I suspect that it will happen during the remaining two years and three months of the Trump administration. Trump has been too inconsistent for any such forecasts to be made with complete certainty. But I am confident that last week’s decisions will go down as the turning point in this war.

But it is not yet five months since Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the Oval Office ended abruptly — and in humiliating fashion — after Trump dressed down his Ukrainian opposite number, accusing him of “gambling with World War III”. Trump’s months-long charm offensive with Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, was characterized by lengthy and seemingly convivial phone calls that flattered the Russian president’s ego. Nonetheless, it did not budge the Kremlin’s position on the war. An apparently irate Trump, who styles himself as the ur-peacemaker, now claims to want to “finish” the war through other means. On the surface, it seems as if Trump’s policy toward Russia and Ukraine has entirely shifted in the last two weeks.

If Trump is still committed to ending the war in Ukraine, which last autumn he promised he could do in 100 days, then he has decided — for the time being at least — to achieve that goal by forcing Vladimir Putin to back down rather than giving him what he wants. Today, he is not just promising a restored weapons supply, he is even purportedly asking Zelensky if he can strike deep into Russian territory, potentially as far as Moscow. “Absolutely”, reportedly replied Zelensky, “We can, if you give us the weapons.” Is this a new Trump, whose electoral commitment to isolationism and peace has seen him launch attacks on Iran and now promise to use American military might to bend Moscow to his will? And if this new, serious Trump is willing to use such levers to get his way, do his intentions go beyond a change in policy toward Russia and Ukraine?

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The halls of power in Washington are riven with divides over these questions. A substantial group, including, most notably, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, have been vocal advocates for a rapprochement with Moscow, which they see as a means to disrupt the emerging Russia-China partnership by trying to get on side with Moscow and thus weaken Beijing. Meanwhile, another group, including Senator Lindsey Graham, advocates for a more hawkish policy toward Russia that resembles Cold War-era visions of containment and would play well with an American public that remains deeply suspicious of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In recent days, analysts have struggled to understand where Trump stands, given that the president now seems to be as critical of Vladimir Putin as he has been of Xi Jinping, and whether his new approach will last.

The explanation for the last fortnight’s events is as simple as it is frustrating for analysts and Ukraine’s military planners: although the White House’s policy in the short-term may have changed, the underlying logic of Trump’s behavior remains just the same. Few can disagree that Donald Trump — ever since the Eighties, and certainly since 2016 — has been a creature who feeds on, and whose persona has been created by, media attention. It is Vladimir Putin’s continued stalling over giving Trump the grandest of all headlines — Trump as the great peacemaker in Ukraine, Trump as a potential Nobel Peace Prize winner — that is likely motivating the president to change tack today.

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Trump seems to feed on news coverage that, whether as hero or villain, makes him out as the protagonist of the story: the deal-maker who calls the shots. Look at how often he complains of being treated unfairly by the media, how he stages extravagant shows of signing executive orders and appearing in the White House to dictate the run of political play, and how he even brought a military parade to Washington in June. Trump’s staged phone calls with Putin, his elaborately orchestrated peace talks in Saudi Arabia, and his Oval Office blow-up with Zelensky — all of which favored the Russian president — have come to nought.

Moreover, theatrics sympathetic to Putin now offer diminishing media coverage, as the public have become used to them. Unlikely to succeed, making another offering to Putin would be of little interest to a fatigued public and media. What better than to perform an outrageous volte-face, play the strong man, and generate endless inches of media coverage in articles just like this one? Look past the headlines, and Trump is behaving entirely predictably, at least according to his own lights.

Unsurprisingly, then, the Russian political apparatus is totally unfazed by what seems like terrifying news for a country whose economy is barely running on fumes and which can barely stop Ukraine’s makeshift drone strikes, let alone repel offensive US-made weaponry. The Russian stock market surged in response to the news of the weapons deal and Trump’s talk of sanctions, while former Russian president and current Security Council member Dmitry Medvedev on Twitter dismissed Trump’s move as a “theatrical ultimatum.” Hardly known for his political nous, even Medvedev has Trump pegged.

Should Trump make good on his latest promises — and there is no guarantee that the weapons systems at hand will make their way to Ukraine, let alone be used for offensive strikes on Russia itself — the war might well be prolonged or even turned. That, of course, would still turn on Ukraine being able to strike deep and hard enough into Russian territory to affect the population en masse or to cause fear of a military collapse among the Russian elites. Should massive tariffs or wide sanctions on Russia also be implemented, Trump and Ukraine may even force a desperate Putin to the negotiating table. Until they do, Volodymyr Zelensky and his allies — especially the NATO nations that have been on tenterhooks ever since the American president was inaugurated in January — will at least be pleased with this new spirit of collaboration.

Nonetheless, they will remain hesitant about whether a man like Donald Trump can really commit to a long-term policy of military support for both Ukraine and the Western alliance. In a BBC interview on 14 July, Trump admitted that he trusts “almost nobody”. Should Vladimir Putin find a way to stroke the president’s ego, give him an opportunity for a grand media spectacle, and allow him to make some more headlines, another sudden U-turn might be in the offing. State visits, gifts, and all sorts of other attention-generating moves might be enough.

Meanwhile, there is only one big winner from this chaos. As Trump continues to blow hot and cold with his allies, eroding stability and certainty in both the financial and security worlds, Xi Jinping will look on with calm confidence. Until Trump commits to a coherent, long-term strategy that will ensure American economic dominance and military superiority continue — and that would likely mean continued and transparent cooperation with either NATO or another group of reliable allies, a move that today seems unlikely — the day that China overtakes the USA as the world’s superpower only looks to grow closer.

As often happens, Trump breaks with American presidential traditions more in style than in substance. In reality, the 45th and 47th president is in a tradition of realist presidents, going back to Theodore Roosevelt more than a century ago, who have viewed world politics as a great-power club, rather than an arena for idealism.

In brokering the Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, for example, Theodore Roosevelt accepted a Japanese sphere of influence in Korea, South Manchuria, and Sakhalin Island as the price of maintaining a balance of power in East Asia between Russia and Japan. In his 1906 Nobel Peace Prize lecture, TR said that “it would be a masterstroke if those great powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace not only to keep the peace among themselves, but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being broken by others”.

This realist tradition endured the reign of the arch-idealist Woodrow Wilson. Following the entry of the United States into World War I, Wilson asked his adviser Col. Edward M. House to draw up plans for a postwar League of Nations. House suggested to Wilson that such a body “might be confined to the great powers”. In a diary entry at the time, House wrote: “Why permit [smaller powers] to exercise a directing hand upon nations having to furnish not only the financial but the physical force necessary to maintain order and peace? I am sorry to come to this conclusion, because it does not seem toward the trend of liberalism. However, the idealist who is not practical oftentimes does a cause more harm than those frankly reactionary.”

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Wilson’s eventual plan for the League of Nations failed to win ratification in the US Senate, thanks precisely to the realists. Some of these, like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, favored a US-British treaty with France to deter future German aggression but thought that the League of Nations was a utopian experiment doomed to failure.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often held up as an avatar by the internationalists, was much more in the realist grain than they would like to admit. FDR, who had served as assistant secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration, sought to avoid his ex-boss’s mistakes in his own thinking about world order after the defeat of the Axis powers. Roosevelt put his hopes for the postwar world in “the Big Four” or “the Four Policemen”: the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Nationalist China, which would dominate their respective regions, while smaller countries might have “ostensible” participation.

The only “policeman” with a democratic form of government was the United States: Winston Churchill’s Britain ruled its empire outside of the British Isles undemocratically, Stalin’s Soviet Russia was a communist dictatorship, and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist China was an anticommunist dictatorship. When the Declaration of the United Nations (the term for the anti-Axis alliance coined by FDR) was signed on Jan. 1, 1941, the Big Four signed it first; the other 12 members of the alliance had to wait until the following day.

In wartime Britain, too, realism dominated thinking about the postwar world to come. Like FDR, Churchill was skeptical about global institutions in which each state, no matter how small and weak, had equal authority. In 1943, Churchill proposed that a “Supreme World Council” run by the great powers that would oversee regional councils for Europe, the Pacific, and the Western hemisphere. In a visit with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944, Churchill came up with what he referred to as his “naughty document” — a secret agreement that assigned shares of influence in Central Europe and the Balkans to Britain and the Soviet Union. Greece was to be 90% under British influence and 10% under Soviet influence, Yugoslavia and Hungary were to be 50% British and 50%, and so on.

Focused on winning the war, FDR delegated postwar planning for the permanent United Nations organization to his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, an ardent Wilsonian who recreated the flawed design of the League of Nations under a new name. Cold War rivalries immediately paralyzed the great-power-dominated UN Security Council, because each member had a veto.

The Soviet-backed takeover of China by Mao’s Communists turned the Middle Kingdom from a US ally into an enemy, while Britain’s postwar economic weakness left Washington and Moscow as the only two global military powers in a bipolar world. However, the postwar recovery of Western Europe and Japan and the Sino-Soviet split led President Richard Nixon to conclude in July 1971 that there were now five centers of economic power, if only two of military power — the United States, the Soviet Union, Western Europe, Japan, and China.

According to Nixon, “these are the five that will determine the economic future and, because economic power will be the key to other kinds of power, the future of the world in other ways in the last third of this century”. Determined to extricate America from the war in Vietnam and to avoid similar entanglements, Nixon in 1969 had already espoused “the Nixon Doctrine”, declaring that “we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower necessary for its defense”.

Following Nixon’s opening to the People’s Republic of China, the Shanghai Communique in 1972 acknowledged China’s interest in Taiwan: “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States government does not challenge that position.”

Following each of the three global conflicts of the 20th century — the two world wars and the Cold War — idealist hopes for a “new world order” free of great power conflicts excited many Americans. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union into independent republics in 1991 led liberal internationalists to call for “a league of democracies” to police a globalized world society, while neoconservatives dreamed of a single global market and “rules-based order” policed by the Washington alone as the “world’s only superpower”.

But China under Xi Jinping and Russia under Boris Yeltsin and his successors rejected American hegemony and called for a multipolar world in which they would be the hegemonic powers in their own regions. It is not “blaming the victim” to point out that invitations to join the US-led NATO alliance were followed by the Russian invasions of Georgia in 2008 and of Ukraine in 2014 (and, on a larger scale, in 2022).

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The realists saw this coming. On Aug. 1, 1991, three weeks before Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the USSR, President George H. W. Bush, a consummate realist, told the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic that it would be better for Ukraine and the other Soviet republics to remain together in a loose union, rather than make a hard break with Moscow. In the speech, derided as “Chicken Kiev” by the neoconservative New York Times columnist William Safire, the elder Bush warned: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”

For its part, the United States has continued to observe the Monroe Doctrine by treating the North American quartersphere as its own exclusive domain, toppling regimes it does not like and installing clients. Reagan invaded Grenada in 1983, Bush I invaded Panama in 1989, and Clinton invaded Haiti in 1994 in “Operation Uphold Democracy”. By abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban after 20 years of warfare, Joe Biden tacitly acknowledged that Central Asia is less important to Washington than North America. Similarly, by moving quickly to end the costly proxy war in Ukraine and opposing Ukrainian membership in NATO, Trump is signaling that Eastern Europe is not a core American interest, either.

Nor is enmity against Russia baked into the American tradition. For most of the time since the United States achieved independence, Americans have been morally repelled by successive forms of Russian autocracy — even as US diplomats have viewed Russia as a counterweight to powers that pose greater potential threats. During the Civil War, to deter Britain from intervening on the side of the Confederacy, the Lincoln administration welcomed the Russian fleet to American ports, including New York, where Russian naval officers paraded down Broadway past cheering crowds. Harper’s opined that it would “be wise to meet the hostile alliance of the Western Powers of Europe by an alliance with Russia”.

Under Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, an American naval squadron arrived at the Russian Baltic port of Kronstadt to a 21-gun salute and a display of American flags. To thwart British influence in North America, Johnson’s secretary of state, William Seward, bought Alaska from the Tsar and tried but failed to obtain Greenland for the United States. In 1946, the Truman administration offered to buy Greenland from Denmark; in 1955, the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged President Eisenhower to try to buy Greenland; and Trump has revived the idea at a time of increased tensions with Russia and China.

Tsarist Russia was America’s ally against Imperial Germany in World War I, and the Soviet Union was America’s ally against Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II. Only the elimination of other great-power threats led to rivalry between Washington and Moscow. Now that China is viewed as America’s greatest strategic rival, an American strategy of seeking to pry Beijing and Moscow apart, if possible, is only to be expected.

There may be sound arguments based on realpolitik to oppose Trump’s strategy toward Ukraine. But to be consistent, moralists who invoke American ideals ought to condemn FDR and Churchill for agreeing to a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe that lasted half a century after 1945. And they must condemn Eisenhower and Johnson for failing to take significant action to punish the Soviet Union from crushing democratic rebellions in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The ephemeral spasms of Wilsonian utopianism form the exception to the rule that American statesmen in every generation usually are guided by considerations of the national interest in their dealings with other major powers, including those whose internal regimes are repugnant to American principles. Uncle Sam may engage in flowery talk — but allies and enemies alike know that he drives a hard bargain.

Nate Silver’s compelling new book, Living on the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, is ostensibly about mathematical risk, and how it can be understood and used to benefit society accordingly. But I think it’s more about something else: the way we live now. It’s the book Trollope might have written if he had spent his life not as a post office employee but gambling, reading libertarian philosophers and hanging around on the underbelly of 4Chan and Reddit.

The first thing to understand about Silver, best known for his polling website FiveThirtyEight, is that politics does not come naturally to him. As he tells us: “I played poker professionally before I ever wrote a word about politics or built an election model. I still feel more at home in a casino than at a political convention.”

From this starting point, Silver guides us through his world, a particular group of people who he describes as living in “the River”. Poker players, he explains, love water metaphors, and the River is full of “tributaries and niches” inhabited by various types who have indeed spent their lives in the underbelly of the internet and, most importantly for Silver, in casinos. Often, they have played poker for huge sums of money. But the River also has “a canon of influences and ideas”. These range from “game theory and Nash equilibria to expected value and marginal utility” and various other things you have only dimly heard of.

These are people obsessed with numbers, especially ideas of probability so important to games like poker (the book’s first section is all about gambling). This has several effects, not least that it all makes you live a certain way. River people like Silver are “EV maximizers” (“expected-value maximizers”): Rivermen (and, as Silver points out, the River’s inhabitants are overwhelmingly men) take an analytical, strategic approach to gambling, investing and other aspects of life, trying to calculate the most optimal “play” in any given situation. This leads them down some curious paths, not least when Silver considers whether it’s “EV maximizing” to have fries with your sandwich or opt for the healthy side salad. “It might,” he concludes, “depend on how good the fries are.”

For the River, sacred places are not Harvard Yard or the Capitol, but Las Vegas, a “shrine to risk-taking, excess, progress, and capitalism”. All of this is, of course, an affront to what Silver calls “the Village”, which “consists of people who work in government, in much of the media, and in parts of academia (although perhaps excluding some of the more quantitative academic fields such as economics). It has distinctly Left-of-centre politics associated with the Democratic Party.” It is, in other words, the River’s nemesis.

See what’s happening here? Almost all that the Village, shorthand for the established elites, has traditionally prized is viewed by the River with scepticism, not least elite higher education. And this is probably no surprise. It’s hard to think of places that would be less welcoming to Rivermen. More than this, if the River esteems poker players, hedge funders and venture capitalists (gamblers of a different stripe), its emperors are Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Elon Musk — all college dropouts (Musk, admittedly, only at postgraduate level).

What emerges is by now familiar: suspicion of “experts” or “elites” — and the desire to disrupt, or more correctly, take an axe to them. Confrontation is unavoidable. As Silver writes: “Harvard is the grand cathedral atop the hill — there is no more quintessentially Village institution.” So, when hedge funders such as Bill Ackman, rightly enraged by Harvard President Claudine Gay’s tawdry failures to condemn calls for genocide against Jews as hate speech, led the successful drive to remove her, it was “a symbolic coup” for the River. (“Want another sign that the Village and the River are explicitly at war?” Silver asks. “The New York Times’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI.) VCs, Tech titans, data scientists, hedge funders — these are the master-gamblers of Silver’s universe. As he concludes: “The quants won… We’re living in their world.”

Naturally, this can be problematic. First off, revolutionaries almost always curdle into the despised elites they worked so hard to overthrow. Considering the market dominance of Venture Capital firms, Silver concedes that “if success is concentrated only among a few elite firms… to the point where they essentially can’t lose, then VC is becoming more and more like the incumbent institutions that Silicon Valley would deign to disrupt”. The Ivy League’s elite capture doesn’t disappear; it’s merely replaced by that of Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Google and Tesla.

And who are these people? Well, many of them are just Riverman who hit the jackpot. Elon Musk may be a first-rate engineer and businessman, but he’s also an example of what happens when an incel makes $200 billion.

Back in the day, to amass a fortune as an industrialist or oil baron, you had to at least deal with people. Now, the Masters of the Universe are more comfortable with code than conversation. A few years ago, I watched Mark Zuckerberg launch the metaverse, which he did while performatively “chatting” with a grinning — and to my mind clearly terrified — young woman. It was just weird.

Silver understands this. “In the River, it’s common to find people, like Elon Musk or the poker player Daniel ‘Jungleman’ Cates, who self-identify as having Asperger’s syndrome or autism,” he writes. “It’s also common to hear people refer to themselves or others with terms like ‘Aspie’… Depending on the context, this may be derogatory, but it isn’t always so.” For the River, this is more of a cultural marker than a medical diagnosis. What the mainstream views with suspicion or does not understand becomes a source of pride. What it prizes, like Ivy League universities, the River eschews.

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The problem with gambling and risk is that, in irresponsible hands, it can be catastrophic. Silver tells the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto-king turned felon. SBF, he writes, is “a nerdy, overconfident, Adderall-popping, video-game-playing, youngish white guy who has a severe gambling problem and is probably somewhere on the autism spectrum”. This makes him “a common typology” for the River. But he is also a crook, which Silver well understands. SBF’s problem was that he could mouth all the platitudes about EV, Effective Altruism, Rationalism and all other River obsessions — one consequence of reading this book is that I finally understand Dominic Cummings’s blogs — but it made no difference. It’s not even that he didn’t understand risk: he just didn’t care.

So why did so many stats-literate, data-munching, probability-obsessed altruists and tech bros fall under his spell? Once more the answer centres on ideas about the way we live, or rather the way the River seeks to live, and how it will ultimately always fall short of its loftiest aspirations. You can try to game all aspects of life, seek out the EV in every situation, calculate the odds, run your models and algorithms, but in the end, you remain (for the moment at least) irreducibly human. In the words of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz when assessing the SBF disaster: “It must have been the cult of personality. I guess it’s the only explanation.”

And it’s sometimes the only explanation elsewhere, too. It’s no coincidence that gambling, geopolitics and war all centre on the effective calculation of risk. Of course, there are vast and obvious differences between them in terms of cost, scale and repercussion; not least because risk in gambling is typically confined to the realms of chance and individual choice, while geopolitics involves a vastly greater degree of multifaceted interaction and its consequences can be global.

But there is a similarity too: if many of today’s finest minds are gamblers, history has thrown its greatest thinkers at geopolitics. And even when the stakes are life and death, when the players are so various, the same patterns persist. The cult of personality moves history — and it does so repeatedly. The River may have given us SBF, but geopolitics gave us Mao and Stalin and Putin. This is the price of being human, and it will continue to be so. You can bet on it.

Yet despite Putin’s hostility to Lenin, the 2013-14 Ukrainian uprising against the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych was also accompanied by the so-called Leninopad, a mass toppling of Soviet-era statues of Lenin. Meanwhile, in Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, supporters of Yanukovych rallied to defend Lenin’s statues from the iconoclasts.

That Lenin, a man who died a century ago this week, can be held responsible for Ukraine’s break from the Russian orbit and taken as a symbol of Soviet-Russian domination over Ukraine tells us how obscure Lenin’s politics is today. Notwithstanding the fact his embalmed body still lies in Red Square, the real Lenin has been buried by decades of dictatorship and Cold War, the century of sanctification and vilification.

While Putin sees himself as freeing Russia from Lenin’s malign legacy, Putin’s Western critics see him standing in the line of Russian dictators stretching back to Lenin’s overthrow of Russia’s Provisional Government in the October Revolution of 1917. Yet having spent nearly half of his adult life outside of Russia as a political refugee in London, Paris, Munich, Geneva and Zurich, Lenin was as much a figure of the global Belle Époque across 1880-1914 as he was a Russian — a country which he derided as the “prison of nations”, a reference to the Tsar’s oppression of Russia’s many peripheral peoples and minorities.

In addition to the vast cosmopolitan empires of the Tsar, Kaiser and Habsburg emperor, Lenin’s era was also defined by modern progress — of the Cinématographe and airship, of avant-garde artistic experimentation and scientific breakthroughs, of seemingly inexorable economic expansion and industrialisation. Lenin is often cast as the man whose fanatical and authoritarian leadership of the Russian Revolution undid this glorious era of gentle but inexorable progress, and instead ushered in the grim 20th century of one-party governments, sinister deep-state bureaucracies and secret police regimes. Yet the historical record shows that it was Lenin who tried harder than any of his contemporaries to preserve and extend the progress of his time.

He did this by opposing imperialism — not only of the authoritarian monarchies, but also of the liberal-democratic states of the West. With the outbreak of war in 1914, Lenin’s Social Democratic Labour Party was one of the very few political parties that opposed its own country’s entry into the First World War. This was in keeping with the promises of the Basel Manifesto of 1912, an agreement in which the major socialist parties of the world decided through their global organisation, the Second International, to prevent the outbreak of war through coordinated industrial militancy and political opposition — a promise from which many reneged in 1914. Since then, conservatives and liberals alike have bemoaned the disaster of the First World War, while at the same time reserving a special place in hell for one of the very few political leaders in Europe who spoke out against it at the time: Lenin.

It was the Great War that would rip apart the world of the Belle Époque and snuff out the lights across Europe, in the words of the British Foreign Secretary of the time Sir Edward Grey. John Maynard Keynes, another upper-crust figure of this era, concluded that in undoing the “happy age” of European civilisation, the war also revealed the underbelly of that era — what he characterised as the “projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion”, which, he argued, played the “serpent” to the “paradise” of Edwardian-era globalisation.

Unsurprisingly, Lenin thought differently. Rather than rueing the loss of grand bourgeois civilisation or viewing the war as an inevitable fall from grace, he saw the era’s social development as an unstable compound of conflicting forces, which it was potentially possible to steer. As Lenin told the Romanian poet Valeriu Marcu, a fellow wartime exile in Zurich, during a discussion on how best to oppose the war: “One must always be as radical as reality itself.”

In other words, in an era in which the stability of physical reality itself was being undermined by Albert Einstein and Max Planck’s revolutionary overthrow of Newtonian physics, so too the social structures of bourgeois Europe had revealed their own instability. Yet rather than adopting the tragic outlook of Grey and Keynes, for Lenin this meant fighting for the relinquished mantle of 19th-century liberalism — to reclaim its hostility to war and militarism, to overweening state power and empire, to defend the right to self-determination — and extend it, in the form of socialist politics against the disaster of the Great War itself. This included substituting revolution for world war, a prospect which horrified the pacifist Marcu.

On this, however, Lenin was consistent. Less than six months after the revolution of October 1917, Lenin withdrew Russia from the war under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. His peace with Germany undercut the Kaiser’s justification for war, which was to defend Germany against Russia’s imperial expansion to the west. Ultimately, the war ended when the German navy mutinied and soldiers and workers councils sprung up across the German empire, the prospect of revolution precipitating an armistice. By contrast, Woodrow Wilson, re-elected president in November 1917 on a promise to keep the US out of the conflict, led his country into the war less than six months later. To wish away Lenin’s communists is to wish away those who exerted themselves the most — and were in the short-term the most successful — in their efforts to rescue European civilisation from the self-immolation of the Great War.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is widely seen as marking the end of our own neo-Edwardian epoch, the second era of liberal peak-globalisation that began with the fall of the USSR in 1992. That ours was a far more seedy, more hypocritical, less accomplished and less self-assured era than the first Belle Époque is abundantly evident, not least in the fact that we have no statesmen who, like Grey before them, understand how dangerous their diplomatic machinations are surrounding the crisis in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Nor do we have figures of the stature of Keynes who, despite his fabular understanding of the Great War, understood that a prelapsarian politics was impossible, and saw political innovation in the form of vigorous fiscal policies as a necessity in order to preserve liberalism from further implosion.

Even Putin, with all his militaristic brutishness and authoritarian thuggery, has sufficient historic vision to see himself in the role of undoing Lenin’s legacy to restore Russian greatness. By contrast, most Western liberals today, deranged by conspiracy theories about Russian electoral interference, are consumed by a politics of nostalgia for the Nineties, unable even to reach Keynes’s level of understanding and identify the equivalent serpents in their own historic paradise — an effort that would, after all, require them to identify their own sins.

Likewise, we have no organised working-class politics capable of throwing up any popular tribunes worthy of the name, let alone revolutionary statesmen of Lenin’s perspicacity, to combat the drift to another world war. More than any movement of the Left, the most electorally successful anti-war politics of our times has come from a populist of the Right, Donald Trump — a testimony to the failures of the Left if ever there was one. Trump has even borrowed the tactic of Lenin’s fellow anti-war socialist of the Second International, US presidential candidate Eugene Debs, by campaigning on his mugshot. By contrast, the Left, bewitched by the promises of human rights, have themselves been the serpents in their own paradise of globalisation, consistently arguing for the humanitarian crusades that have undercut sovereignty, international law and institutionalised cooperation.

While Lenin and Debs sought to draw the masses deeper into political life to extend the gains of the 19th century, their political opponents across the spectrum drew the opposite conclusion — the need to keep the masses out, blaming the war itself on the masses’ nationalistic fervour. The promise of democratic containment was that war could be avoided, thereby helping to preserve peace and prosperity. It is this promise that has broken down in the 30 years since the fall of the USSR. The more that politics was dominated by the liberal centrists of peak globalisation, the more militaristic Western foreign policy has become, as seen in the rise of the Forever Wars.

From this, we can draw the conclusion that greater democratic influence in politics is needed as a counterweight to blithe liberals blundering into a new era of great power rivalry and permanent war. Unlike Lenin and Debs, who were riding the crest of the waves of popular enfranchisement and working-class self-assertion, being “as radical as reality” today means drawing the masses back into politics —not as a revolutionary act but nonetheless as a necessary one. For only then might we be able to overcome the disastrous legacy of the 20th century, and emerge from the mire of authoritarian great power politics.

The dirty secret is that we were only able to sanction so much wealth because British governments have for decades welcomed Russian oligarchs, encouraged them to spend money here, and pointedly failed to question the origins of that wealth. By providing them with a safe haven for their money, and a playground in which to spend it, we have — in the manner of a particularly-obliging fence for stolen goods — encouraged them to steal evermore egregiously.

And if we were providing a safe haven for Russian oligarchs, we had no need to employ any investigators, which means — now we’ve suddenly changed our minds about the desirability of welcoming dirty money — we have no one sufficiently skilled or experienced to bring cases against them. So, all of this frozen money is in limbo, and its owners aren’t happy about it. The problems will start with legal challenges, the first of which is imminent. Eugene Shvidler is a Russian born UK-US citizen and, according to Forbes, is worth $1.7 billion. The British government sanctioned him last March because of his business ties with Roman Abramovich, saying that he was “involved in obtaining a benefit from or supporting the Government of Russia”, which his lawyers say is plainly unfair.

The case is due to be heard next month, and lawyers certainly sound like they’ve gearing up to bring more cases against the UK’s sanctions. “They are an act of war and a gross departure from the rule of law,” Robert Amsterdam, a partner at Amsterdam & Partners in London who has been working on high-profile oligarch-related cases for decades, told The Times. “Western governments have sanctioned Russians who have nothing to do with Putin and fail to understand that not all rich Russian businessmen are oligarchs and Putin cronies.”

Among the wealthy Russians with substantial amounts of wealth frozen in London are Andrei Guryev, fertiliser tycoon and owner of Witanhurst, the second-biggest house in the capital; Oleg Deripaska, the aluminium baron whose property on Belgrave Square was invaded by anarchists a year ago; Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven, bankers who’ve tried using British lawyers to clear their names before; and, of course, Abramovich himself.

It’s easy to see why they might choose to employ their right to challenge the Government’s decision to freeze their assets. Sanctioned oligarchs have a “general licence” to use otherwise-blocked money to pay legal fees, which makes a court challenge a free hit: if you’re going to lose your wealth anyway, you may as well spend it on lawyers. Having imposed limits on dozens of oligarchs, as well as multiple banks, the Office for Financial Sanctions Implementation will be tied up in these cases for years, and ministers don’t know what to do about it. It’s politically impossible for ministers to cancel the sanctions, so the frozen property will become a legal piñata, showering fees down onto any lawyers prepared to give it a whack, and using up ever more of civil servants’ time.

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Britain is Putin's playground

By Oliver Bullough

And that risks distracting us from the most important question we need to ask, which is: why was £18 billion worth of suspicious Kremlin-linked property in Britain in the first place? The UK’s unique combination of a friendly tax regime, biddable politicians, luxury housing and under-resourced law enforcement agencies have made it a home from home for kleptocrats the world over. Unlike in the United States, where federal agencies prosecute financial criminals no matter how deep their pockets, cash-stripped British investigators are vanishingly unlikely to probe the wealth of anyone able to afford a good legal team.

The Government has brought in new legislation over the past year to close some of the worst loopholes in our financial system. It is no longer possible for the ownership of UK properties to be hidden behind offshore shell companies; or for anonymous UK companies to be used to launder money through foreign bank accounts. And that is welcome. However, despite ministers’ claims, they have done nothing to change the core problem, which is that they don’t have enough officers to enforce the laws that politicians pass. Officers at the National Crime Agency are funded at a third of the level of their counterparts at the FBI, and the same is true at lower levels of policing. Financial crime is 41% of all crime committed in the UK, yet receives less than 1% of police resourcing.

Sanctions are law enforcement on the cheap. Yes, they result in assets being frozen, but only because politicians say so, not as part of a legal investigation, which means they don’t result in prosecution, conviction and confiscation. Sanctions don’t lead anywhere: they’re like an aircraft carrier with no planes; or a government construction programme, which never builds any actual hospitals. Yes, they have a propaganda value, but if we wish to move from freezing assets to seizing them, we come up against the consequences of our decades-long failure to invest in law enforcement.

As one official at the National Crime Agency told me laconically: “The lawyers have a look and say to the director general: ‘worst case scenario, this could cost us a billion’. If you’re the DG and your budget is £800 million, that will give you pause for thought.” Whichever agency you pick – the NCA, the Serious Fraud Office, the Metropolitan or City of London Police forces — you find the same picture: it’s under-staffed, under-resourced and under-motivated. Experienced investigators are continuously being poached by City firms keen to staff their compliance departments, which are able to offer more money and less stress. A senior detective joked to me last month that he was pitching his agency to graduates with the promise that “if you work for us, you’ll walk into a job at HSBC in three years’ time”.

In an attempt to ensure its limited resources are used effectively, six years ago the Government created the National Economic Crime Centre. But without sufficient resourcing, it has failed to deliver the “step-change” politicians promised, and instead just issues press releases announcing things that would have happened anyway. Grumpy officers now grumble that its NECC acronym really stands for “National Experts for Claiming Credit”.

Investigating kleptocratic wealth is hard at the best of times: its owners’ identities are hidden behind shell companies in multiple jurisdictions, and are protected by the world’s finest lawyers. When the NCA did bring a case against houses owned by the daughter and grandson of the former president of Kazakhstan, its lawyers were eviscerated by opponents from City gunslingers Mishcon de Reya, ably assisted by the near-bulletproof Panamanian shell structures through which the property was owned. Meanwhile, prosecutors seeking evidence of how wealth has been stolen have to rely on counterparts in the kleptocrats’ home countries, where crooked police officers will not give evidence against their own bosses.

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that Britain’s already-stretched officers have two competing demands: first, they have to investigate the wealth brought into our country during the decades-long “no questions asked” period; and secondly, they have to prevent more wealth joining it from other countries plagued by kleptocratic elites, whether they’re elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, in the Far East, South Asia, Africa or elsewhere. London’s new Nine Elms district is just the most visible example of developments built to attract hot money from Far Eastern investors, much of which will be as questionable as the Russian money we welcomed in the past.

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Russia has no more oligarchs

By Jade McGlynn

And so the sanctioned Russian wealth is stuck. It cannot be confiscated, because the UK lacks the investigative firepower to bring solid cases to court; but it cannot be released, because to do so would strengthen Vladimir Putin, an indicted war criminal. This stalemate benefits no one, except the lawyers who are paid to maintain it.

Is there a way through? Possibly. But to find it we first need to ask what problem the sanctions were designed to solve. Before February 2022, the threat of them was intended to dissuade Vladimir Putin from attacking Ukraine at all, a task at which they self-evidently failed. When war began, sanctions were employed to deny the Kremlin access to money it could use to fight its war by freezing it in place. That aim has been achieved, but risks being undone if successful legal challenges reduce the amount of wealth that is frozen. Officials now talk about a new aim, which is to confiscate the frozen wealth, and to use it to help Ukraine rebuild its bridges, roads, houses, schools, hospitals, power stations and factories.

Last July, Canada passed a law allowing its government to seize sanctioned assets, in order to help Ukraine and compensate Putin’s victims. In December, it began a confiscation process against wealth owned by one of Abramovich’s companies under this new simplified procedure. Here the Canadians have offered a path for us to follow. It feels wrong to take property away without a court proceedings, but leaving the money in limbo risks it being dissipated in legal fees like a super-charged 21st-century Jarndyce v Jarndyce. And perhaps, if we can confiscate some of this property, we’ll help ourselves too: we’ll cool our super-heated housing market; we’ll drive dirty money out of politics; and we’ll prevent new Putins from building new kleptocracies.

In public, the talk might still be of liberating every inch of Ukrainian territory, but speak privately to those in London, Paris or Washington, and a cynical and sombre mood emerges. Here the talk is less of sweeping Ukrainian advances to come and more of a conflict that is likely to descend ever further into the anarchic quagmire before it stands a chance of emerging, grasping towards some kind of settlement. Over the past few weeks I have spoken to officials at the most senior levels of the British government in an attempt to get a sense of how those guiding UK policy see the war developing during the course of 2023. The overwhelming consensus is that the war in Ukraine is likely to get a lot more chaotically unpredictable before it settles — if it ever does.

Most striking is how few hold much hope for a decisive victory for either side. For many in London, Berlin and Paris, today, Ukraine’s best-case scenario is to stabilise the front sufficiently to allow it to emerge as a viable, independent state, able to defend itself — to be able to breathe and live as a relatively normal country, to trade and grow, export and settle. The unstated goal, in other words, is to grasp towards a temporary settlement which eventually becomes a permanent reality even if no one ever officially recognises it as such. Conflicts have ended this way before: Kashmir, which has been “temporarily” settled since the Forties, and Korea which remains divided and at war while still being at peace.

The question Western diplomats are now asking themselves is what this “minimal breathable scenario” now looks like for Ukraine? I’m told it consists of three basic factors: first, giving Ukraine the capability to be able to stop Russia’s constant aerial bombardment beyond a future ceasefire; second, to ensure Ukraine’s free access to the Black Sea, and third, to secure a stable front. “This is the minimum Ukraine needs before it can even consider talking,” one official put it to me. The problem is that the pre-conditions for Ukraine to emerge as such a functioning, independent state are not in place. And so the war will drag on — potentially for a long time yet.

The war, according to one senior UK official is, in some senses, “eternal”. “The Western mind wants to know when these things can be wrapped in a bow,” the official said. “But they can’t.” The problem is that Russia simply does not believe Ukraine is a separate nation or legitimate state, but a part of greater Russia, in the same way China sees Taiwan. For as long as Ukraine is independent, in other words, there will be conflict. The “end” in such circumstances is little more than a temporary ceasefire in which Russia accepts it cannot improve its position.

The appointment of Valery Gerasimov as the commander of the Russian war effort is seen, in particular, as an indication that Moscow was now going all-out. Gerasimov is widely believed to be more offensive than his rival Sergey Surovikin who oversaw Russia’s retreat last year, stabilising its lines of defence.

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Is the West escalating the Ukraine war?

By Arta Moeini

The fear in London and Paris is that Gerasimov’s appointment, combined with Putin’s mobilisation, will allow Russia to bring to bear its two most important advantages: numbers and the ability to escalate. Over time, Russia’s numerical supremacy will begin to show on the battlefield. To some extent, the effect has already been felt. Ukraine is already being forced to sacrifice its “good” soldiers for Russia’s “bad” ones — conscripts and convicts — who the Kremlin has no qualms about sending into the meat grinder. The second advantage is escalatory dominance. In short, Russia can bomb Ukraine in a way Ukraine cannot bomb Russia. As long as this remains the case, Ukraine cannot emerge as a free state.

In Paris, there is particular concern about this “double asymmetry”. As such, French military advisers are, again, very cautious about how the war will unfold. The French president and those around him think the war will last for a long time with no clear conclusion. In Berlin, a similar sense of fatalism has taken hold. Few think the Russians will ever give up Donetsk, Luhansk or Crimea and most now see a long, drawn-out war with no obvious way out. “There’s no real sense that Russia can be defeated,” one analyst in Berlin told me.

Given this, most believe Putin’s plan is to play it long — to simply outlast the West. He may have calculated that there is little the West can do about the asymmetry of the conflict, given that no Western capital would consider putting boots on the ground or attacking Russia directly. This, after all, is what happened in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, where Western dominance was eventually seen off by smaller regional powers who calculated — correctly — that they would stay the course and the US would not. But, while the prognosis in Western capitals is gloomy, perhaps it is — once again — too gloomy. Many analysts are unconvinced that Russia can carry on indefinitely. Its offensive this year has been less than impressive.

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'Absolute victory over Russia isn't possible'

By Fiona Hill

The only route to a settlement as they all see it, is for the West to squeeze the heat out of the conflict by giving Ukraine what it needs to convince Russia it cannot win. And if there is ever a ceasefire, the West must be free to arm Ukraine sufficiently to protect itself from any future Russian attack. These are the parameters of a deal — there is now no other way.

The danger for Ukraine now lies less in being overrun but in losing a clear narrative arc that its Western supporters can believe in: the noble underdog triumphing over its evil colonial oppressor. If the war descends into a confusing series of offensives and counter-offensives in which there is no obvious victor, towns and villages nobody has ever heard of being taken and re-taken, the clarity of this narrative begins to muddy.

This general fear of inertia, then, is really a fear of the biggest strategic concern of all: losing the West’s support, particularly American support. Should Ukraine find itself defending territory rather than advancing, many in Europe’s capitals believe that the public will lose interest. If it is still dragging on by the winter, there could be another squeeze on energy supplies, creating another surge in prices. How would the public react? What if next winter is brutally cold?

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Were the DUP right all along?

By Tom McTague

In the United States, attention will quickly turn to the 2024 presidential election. How will Donald Trump’s bid for re-election play into this? There is a concern that his magnetic pull on the Republican party will drag rivals into promising to bring the war to an end on whatever terms. In Germany, the ruling Social Democratic party is already particularly cautious about the war effort.

Most of the analysts I spoke to are optimistic in one fundamental sense — that Russia will not be able to overrun the whole of Ukraine. Yet most are now pessimistic that Russia can be entirely defeated. The goal that many in the West now privately aspire to, then, is to “asphyxiate” the conflict by strangling Russia’s hope of victory before the West loses interest.